Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) recently announced the creation of a reparations task force whose objective is to develop a definition and framework for reparations to be delivered in the form of improvements in housing, education, jobs, and criminal justice.
"Reparations will be an investment in our neighborhoods and our people," he declared Monday during a Juneteenth celebration. "It will unlock the doors of prosperity to fully flow through the neighborhoods that have been disinvested in for decades."
The task force will also conduct a study to catalog policies that have harmed African Americans in Chicago, including controversial real estate practices like redlining and restrictive covenants.
Alderman Nick Sposato, a critic of Johnson, has told Fox Chicago the planned $500,000 to fund the task force could be better spent elsewhere.
"It's too divisive; it's going to divide us even more," he said. "I don't know what the fairness about it would be. Maybe the report will say it's unnecessary, but I highly doubt that."
"What makes that very disingenuous is that nobody else has to have a study before they spend money," responds ChicagoRED founder and chair P Rae Easley. "They didn't have to study before they gave the illegals $300 million. That's the first issue. The second issue … is that the city of Chicago has a very strained relationship with the black community [but] does not have the money to pay for the harms that they put forth."
"This is just a psych op in my opinion," she adds.
Easley's goal is to move citizens away from the liberal progressive failures that are bankrupting the city, and she acknowledges that the push for reparations is nothing new.
"The people on the commission have been working to get this commission in the city of Chicago for a number of years," she reports. "[Johnson] has acquiesced to their request because the Democratic Party is purging black members. So now he can say, 'OK, look -- even though we gave all of your tax money to the illegals, at least we're trying to figure out how to give some to you, too.'"
"That's what makes it kind of dishonest to me," she concludes.
Chicago has long been a Democratic stronghold; it last elected a Republican as mayor in 1927, when William H. Thompson served until 1931.
